Sweden: Iraqi embassy in huge passport blunder

The Iraqi embassy in Stockholm has admitted issuing 26,000 passports based on false documentation to asylum seekers in Sweden and Norway. Migration minister Tobias BillstrÃ¶m is set to meet his Norwegian counterpart in Oslo on Wednesday to discuss the matter.

Details surrounding the fraudulent passport applications first emerged in Norwegian press after police cracked a forgery ring in Oslo. The Iraqi ambassador to Sweden informed Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that the embassy had issued passports based on false documentation simply because it did not have the resources to check the authenticity of the paperwork.

“We have known for a long time that the Iraqi embassy has been issuing passports on false premises, but what can we do about it? This is a question for the foreign ministry. They know about this. We have presented the information in various reports,” Bengt HellstrÃ¶m from the Swedish Migration Board told Metro.

He added that the Migration Board has received numerous tip-offs over the last two years suggesting that people from Syria, Iran, Turkey and Lebanon have been able to get passports from the Iraqi embassy.

Gustaf Lind, secretary of state at the justice department, says that his department has known about the problem for a month.

“What we have done is to get civil servants at the justice department and the Migration Board to check out the information. We haven’t really formed a judgment yet but the foreign ministry has called the Iraqi ambassador in to discuss the matter on Wednesday,” said Lind.

The Migration Board received reports in autumn of last year that a certain type of Iraqi passport in circulation was of inferior quality and relatively easy to manipulate.

“We are looking into whether we should approve this type of passport. We will probably make a decision in February,” said Marianne Andersson, a spokeswoman for the Migration Board.

She adds that a number of EU countries – UK, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg – have already decided not to approve the type of passport in question.

“The passport itself may be authentic but it may not be clear whether individuals really are who they claim to be,” said Andersson.

Cherie Blair has criticised Muslim religious dress for women where it fails to acknowledge “the woman’s right to be a person.”

The wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against the full-face veil, or niqab, worn by strictly Islamic women worldwide because it could prevent a woman from expressing her personality.

Mrs Blair, a practising Roman Catholic who is to publish her own memoirs in October next year, admitted that she had herself been educated by Catholic nuns who wore veils. She said she had no problem with women covering their heads.

* Would you read Cherie BLiars memoirs?

But on Islamic veils, she said: “I think however, that if you get to the stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because we cannot see her face, then we do have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman’s right to be a person.”

Mrs Blair’s own Church forbids the ordination of women, forbids women from using condoms even when their husband has been infected by HIV while working away…

CNSNews.com) – Muslim extremists are branding opponents “Islamophobes” in an effort to paint themselves as the victim and silence dissent and opposition to their political and religious beliefs, according to a panel convened in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
“‘Islamophobia’ has become … the new battleground in this war” on terrorism, Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said at the panel discussion.

She said the term “inverts victim and perpetrator” by portraying Islamic fanatics as the victim, thus allowing them to label dissent as a violation of human rights and, in effect, silence dissent.

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) at the United Nations has been lobbying hard for bans against “Islamaphobia, which are “tantamount to blasphemy strictures that have been used to curtail freedoms of expression, press, and religion by some of the OIC’s most repressive member states,” noted the Hudson Institute in its preview to the panel discussion.

The term “Islamaphobia” will be a major focus of the 2009 U.N. World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa.

* The jizya is flowing. But what will the recipients give the UK for all the money? An end to Islamic supremacist sentiments in Britain? Highly doubtful, since they won’t even admit that Islamic supremacism exists at all.

* Meanwhile, if the other religious groups in Britain want to get Â£70m from the government, it’s an easy thing: get some of their members to blow some things up, claim that you can’t work against this sort of thing without large sums of money from the government, and the cash will start flowing.

“Muslim groups get Â£70m to tackle extremism,”

Stubborn delusion in the UK continues:

Muslim groups will receive Â£70 million in Government funds to help tackle extremism in “ungoverned spaces” such as internet chat rooms and snooker halls.
Hazel Blears, Communities Secretary, said that the money will be targeted at Muslim communities and rejected suggestions that the funding discriminated against other faith groups.

Ms Blears said: “This is a generational issue. We have got to get to young people – five to 15-year-olds, as well as the teenagers who are currently being targeted – and strengthen their resilience, so that they can say to the extremists ’I am comfortable with being a Muslim in Britain today and I want no part of it’.”

* No, it’s an ideological issue, and until Blears and Co. recognize that, all the money they throw at the problem will accomplish nothing.